Texas families, doctors file lawsuit challenging state’s gender-affirming care ban

Five Texas families with transgender children and three medical providers are suing the state over a new law preventing minors from accessing gender-affirming health care, arguing in a lawsuit filed this week that the measure “threatens the health and wellbeing” of transgender young people.

Texas Senate Bill 14, scheduled to take effect Sept. 1, prohibits health care providers from administering gender-affirming medical care to minors for the purpose of “transitioning a child’s biological sex” or affirming a child’s perception of their own sex “if that perception is inconsistent with the child’s biological sex.” Biological sex under the law is determined by an individual’s “sex organs, chromosomes, and endogenous profiles.”

Specifically, the state’s ban bars physicians and other medical professionals from “knowingly” providing a range of medical treatments used to treat gender dysphoria, including puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries, to minor patients. The provision of those same treatments, however, is still permitted to treat other medical diagnoses, such as precocious puberty.

The new law also subjects providers who violate it to a range of penalties, including the revocation of their medical licenses or “other authorization to practice medicine,” and it strips state funding from any “entity, organization, or individual that provides or facilitates” gender-affirming health care to transgender youths.

The state attorney general under the law is permitted to take certain legal action against an individual if there is “reason to believe that person is committing, has committed, or is about to commit” a violation of the measure.

Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed the bill into law in June, making Texas the largest state in the nation to ban gender-affirming care for transgender youths. In all, 20 states have passed laws restricting access to transgender health care.

In the lawsuit filed Wednesday in Travis County District Court in Texas, parents of transgender children and teenagers between the ages of 9 and 16 argued that enforcing the law would cause “probable, imminent, and irreparable injuries” to their families.

“Because my daughter might need puberty blockers in the next few months, I am temporarily relocating out of state with her and my other child. Her father will stay behind to continue working in Texas,” said Mary Moe, a plaintiff and the mother of Maeve Moe, a 9-year-old transgender girl. “We all intend to return and reunite in our home once it is safe for Maeve to receive this care in the state.”

“I am heartbroken to have to take my children away from their home and their father, even temporarily,” she added. “But I know that Texas is not a safe place for my daughter if this law forbids her access to this care.”

Nathan Noe, a 16-year-old transgender boy and another plaintiff in the lawsuit, said Thursday that, as a young child, “the idea of growing up as a woman felt so indescribably and inexplicably wrong.”

“I was constantly unhappy,” he said. “Being on testosterone has tremendously improved all aspects of my life. I am now able to focus on all of the positives of my life and experience my teenage years to the fullest. I am able to socialize and balance schoolwork without thinking about my gender all the time.”

“I love Texas,” Noe said Thursday in a statement. “This is my community. This is where my family lives. This is the place I grew up and I do not want to leave it because my government has decided to attack people like me.”

Additional plaintiffs in Wednesday’s lawsuit include three medical professionals and two LGBTQ organizations that represent hundreds of families and health professionals across the state. They are represented by Lambda Legal, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Texas, the Transgender Law Center and the law firms Scott Douglass & McConnico LLP and Arnold & Porter Kaye Scholer, LLP.

Defendants include the Texas Medical Board and Health and Human Services Commission, as well as John Scott, the state’s acting attorney general. Scott’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.